BRIATRIBE #1 – BRAND NEW BEER

DO BREWERIES BELIEVE THE BRAND IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE BEER?

There comes a time when a beer has changed so significantly due to changes in the ingredients and the brewing process that it has become a totally different product. Some beers have even transformed from deep, rich, amber brews into pale, thin, hoppy beers but retained the same name but usually it is just, unfortunately, a general dumbing down of the beer to make it more palatable to more people or, in reality, less distinctive and therefore less offensive to more people.

I understand that this is just good, commercial sense: create a product of quality, gain a reputation for it then, once the brand is established, make the product more marketable - which often means blander unless you are going for a niche market– then, perhaps, when the product is a big success, sell the brand to the highest bidder before your market declines. Although this is misleading, often to the point of being deceitful, it is legal so is a very successful business model but surely there comes a time when it is complete misrepresentation? Take the most successful girl-group of this century (so far), the Sugababes* for example. Ten years into their existence the entire group became different from the one that started and what began as an innovative soul sound has transformed into a rather embarrassing, desperate, bandwagon-jumping, Frankenstein’s monster-style hybrid of everything that has been successful over the previous few months. In short, the cash-cow brand has been established now it must be milked at all costs until it is well and truly spent.

The beer example of this that comes to mind, historically, is the cream of Manchester: Boddington’s Bitter. I was lucky enough to have drunk it occasionally in my early drinking years when travelling in the north-west of England as it was only generally available there back then. It was a pale, hoppy, straw-coloured session beer that just oozed quality and flavour despite being only 3.5% alcohol. Not the best beer in the world but certainly one you were pleased to see on the bar. Then, it happened. What had happened to countless breweries in the latter half of the 20^thcentury: the umbrella of Whitbread breweries cast its shadow over Salford and Strangeway’s Brewery became part of that empire which, as history had already shown us, leads inevitably to takeover and closure. It took a while. The beer was revamped and heavily advertised on TV with parody storylines bursting the pretentious bubble of other products that had ideas above its station and championing Boddies as a down-to-earth Manchester beer drank by real locals. First to go was the hops. Too expensive. Then, most of the handpumps went as it was re-launched as one of the revolutionary new ‘smoothflow’ beers dispensed from ludicrously oversized founts by means of nitrogen rather than the gassier carbon dioxide of keg beers and lagers. Then, eventually, in 2004 the brewery itself was gone and the ‘Cream of Manchester’ was brewed in Wales whilst the cask version, what little remains of it, is seeing out its retirement as part of AB InBev (catchy little name) being contract brewed for them by Hyde’s Brewery in Manchester. You still see it on keg in Spain if you’re very unlucky.

Other familiar beers that a serious case of bean-counting or other debilitating afflictions has happened to over the years:

Fuller’s London Pride / Fuller’s ESB

Everard’s Old Original / Tiger

Young’s Special / Winter Warmer

Hopback Summer Lightning / Crop Circle

Deuchar’s IPA

Timothy Taylor’s Landlord etc.

I have spoken to brewers directly about how their beer and become unrecognisable from the beer it once was and they have denied it to the point of actually believing it themselves. I accept that ingredients change due to supply limitations. I also accept that taste-buds mature and evolve over time and my perception of a beer may be influenced by this and by the circumstances that I drank the beer – everybody knows an ice-cold lager served from a tall, shiny fount into a frosted glass taken fresh from the freezer and drank whilst sat in the sunshine by the pool on holiday with loved ones tastes better than the same beer served at room temperature poured from a can into a plastic beaker in the pouring rain on your own at home when the TV is bust. I even accept that a beer’s flavour can be influenced by what you have previously eaten or drank – the first beer on a Friday night will taste different to the last one no matter what it is – but these are minor variations whereas I am talking about wholesale changes to taste, colour and alcoholic strength.

Fortunately, for every brewery that starts saving money on hops, malt and any other elements of crafting a unique product rather than churning out a beer-flavoured drink there are at least two new brewers who will exploit the new gap in the market. Bitter and lager are being squeezed by innovative new flavours of beer and the big brewers are certainly aware of it and have jumped on the bandwagon (or brewer’s dray) calling some of their beers ‘craft’ and making single-hopped varieties. Ha ha ha ha ha. The last acts of desperate men and women. If any of them use this opportunity to make great beers then good luck to them. But they will not. They will make accountancy-directed brews. Nobody is going to forsake Buxton or Magic Rock beers for them. The best they can hope for is that people who drink Marston’s Pedigree or Bass give it a punt although I’m sure CAMRA will support their endeavours.

So, what’s in a name? The mega-breweries have reached their current status via the common practice of taking over and closing down the competition – if people don’t like your beer over a local product simply remove them from the market and they are left with Hobson’s choice (no reference to the fine Hobson’s brewery from Worcestershire intended).

Anyway, back to the late 1980s: Whitbread were not actually interested in the Boddington’s beer itself but the company had 280 pubs in its estate so it was purely the commercial decision to buy the brand, the estate and the brewing capacity (which was eventually disposed of and the capacity absorbed elsewhere). Yet the beer was mostly only readily available in the north-west of England originally so it wasn’t that famous nationwide and Whitbread already had plenty of beers of a similar strength to Boddies and they didn’t particularly need another beer in their portfolio. But they wanted to buy some credibility. The historic 18^thcentury brewery, started by Samuel Whitbread in London, had already muddied their reputation among beer drinkers by the fairly standard business practice of investing in smaller breweries - which was often referred to as the Whitbread umbrella - as although their financial muscle was perceived as securing the future of these smaller competitors it gave Whitbread an edge in terms of being able to step in with a takeover bid when one of them appeared lucrative.

Let us not forget though that Boddies itself had taken over the Oldham brewery in 1982 and Higson’s of Liverpool in 1985. Business is business. It’s a dog eat dog world and survival of the fittest, and all that, yet, behind all the monopolies and mergers - and where exactly were the Monopolies and Mergers Commission in all this? – the breweries had learned that it wasn’t how great their beer was that mattered but who could develop the most important brand. Image was everything. It was the eighties and if you watch a retro video show of music from that period you may find it hard to believe that people were swayed by such heavy-handed, crass marketing but they were. And still are to a degree. Bigger was best and greed was good, apparently. They weren’t the only ones at it as the brewing world was carved up mostly by half a dozen players until 1992 when the government’s Beer Orders came along to save us – ha ha ha. [See a later post on this topic.]

Global brewer Coors most recent sizeable gambit was buying the extremely dull brown beer brand of Sharp’s of Rock in Cornwall. They have bought volume for sure but unlike its predecessors it was not a great beer with a great reputation that is now on the wane but it was already an established brand. It never was a sought after beer just ubiquitous in the same way as Greene King boasts that their ‘IPA’ (in inverted commas, for obvious reasons) is the biggest selling cask beer in the country; Well that’s because it’s in nearly every pub! That’s the same way estate agents call large housing-estates‘popular areas’ when they actually mean ‘densely populated areas’ which is not the same as the implication that people desire to live there ahead of other areas. It is like saying the years between 1939 and 1945 were a popular time to die. Volume does not always equate to popularity. Most governments tend to assume power even though many more people DIDN’T vote for them than DID vote for them. More people DISLIKE Manchester United football club than SUPPORT them. This is just semantics, I know, but I wanted to make it clear that aggressive branding exercises do not necessarily make a product loved, trusted or even desired but can actually become counter-productive; Woolworths was known as a cheap and cheerful shop (low-end) so when they had to try and compete with really cheap shops or up their game and attempt to become known as a retail outlet that sold quality goods at a reasonable price (mid-market) they were left in no-persons-land and went belly-up (yes, I know there were other factors involved).

Brands can become a millstone as much as a meal-ticket. So why try and re-establish a dead brand? That’s what a brewery concern calling themselves Truman’s are doing. Truman’s was a very old brewery established in the centre of London in 1666 – at one time allegedly the largest brewery in the world - and when the brewery closed in 1989 the real-estate value was monumental. The beers were brewed elsewhere for a while but then were axed. All traces of Truman’s as a London business was all but gone save for a handful of their very decoratively tiled pubs that still live on. This new brewery venture will not likely be able to recreate the same recipes from quarter of a century ago and beyond (although they are attempting to) and they are not even on any of the sites where beer was brewed under that banner nor, I believe, is anyone related to anyone from the original family that started the brewery nearly 350 years ago. Why resurrect an archaic brand name when not that many people remember or care about the beer or brand anyway? Maybe they believe any history is better than none at all. If the beer is great I’ll drink it but I won’t just because it has the same name as a beer I remember from the past. That is the point of this piece: Do brewers believe that the brand is more important than the product?

The 21^stcentury consumer is savvier than the last century’s chump because advertising and branding is so well established now that it starts from birth if you are born in a hospital which has a fast-food chain in the foyer. The saturation in all media has made us blind to it. People can view a website and pick out the bits of information they want and not even read the ads anymore – it’s a skill that has evolved since the inception of the internet so is hereditary now and people who believe subliminal advertising works are missing the point that consumers no longer trust advertising: Probably the best beer in the world is probably not the best slogan in the world. Even a child recognises hyperbole. Today’s consumer may still buy into brands but they want to be seduced and encouraged to do so not deceived and corralled. Treating people like idiots is a sure way of upsetting them – even if they are idiots.

So rather than waste a lot of time, effort and money fighting for the consumer’s hard earned pennies I propose that manufacturers, businesses and corporations all simply make the best product they possibly can and let social media do the rest. The new brewers are doing that. Sure, they aim to define their brand with marketing and presentation and, let’s face it, nobody does that quite like BrewDog but they have the quality products to back up the hype and attitude or they would soon get found out by the discerning market they have courted. Now, I’m off to the Euston Tap to have a half of Summer Wine Brewery’s 10% Clynelish Barrel-Aged Kopikat Imperial Coffee Stout because I saw on Twitter that they have it on draft and somebody I trust told me it was very good.

* PS – Since beginning this Briatribe I hear that the original Sugababes, which is Mutya, Keisha and Siobhan, have got back together to record new music. This is the equivalent of the Strangeway’s Brewery reopening and brewing original Boddington’s Bitter again but also having a go at an IPA and a Saison. Hooray!